theindiearmy

second ... I am guessing it is an OK/good gaming machine but not great

third .... 1000 dollars ... that's 1K ! Wait for school sales and get this type of system for much less. The graphics card is OK (better are out there) but not 1K great. The i7 is OK but is rather old version (2-3 yrs for the i7 ~ must be better ones out there).

Overall: pass

I was thinking the same thing. I just picked up the Lenovo Y510p for about $100 more. It's got a Haswell i7 and SLI GT750s in it. Thing is an absolute screamer.

coupe42

chambers126 wrote:I've had one of these for about 8 months. I easily upgraded the RAM to 16 GB and added a 480 GB SSD. The graphics are top notch and the system flies. I work on the road ... easily fills in as an office PC away from home.

My only issue ... and it's a big one ... is Asus service. A "3 to 5 day" repair took 6 weeks and 2 trips. They didn't repair it the first trip (ethernet and DVD), lost it twice, and then shipped it to the wrong address. I spent at least 10 hours on the phone. And no, they don't speak English very well.

If it works, it's awesome. I've dealt with HP and Dell service. HP especially is not good, but they are 10 times better than Asus. All things considered, I would buy a Dell.

I own an Alienware M17 (Dell PC) and had nothing but problems with it from day 1. Just about every issue you can imagine from hardware to software issues. When, with heavy emphasize on when, it runs it does OK for a $2,200 20lb brick... When it doesn't, don't expect anything remotely close to quality customer service from Dell. They're neither timely nor insightful on trouble shooting issues, but they are very knowledgeable and dependable when it comes to reminding you about your warranty limitations and related out of pocket costs for customers. Based on that experience I bought my next gaming laptop from NW and had no issues with the performance of the rig or service. Dell = bad.

tmoneytron

xninjagrrl wrote:I'm with you on the Y-series Lenovos. My Y500 has better specs than this and only cost me $800 two months ago. I've already seen Y510 750M SLI deals for a grand or less. Those have haswell and I believe Optimus enabled. Yeah yeah I should have waited lol.

I just got a Lenovo y410p for 769 with a Barnes and Nobles coupon. It's got a newer Haswell processor and the GT 750m which is about 10% faster than the GTX 660m.

This isn't a good deal. The y410p is also only 14" so it's super portable, unlike this massive Asus machine. Don't get me wrong, I like Asus, but I have a ROG 15.6" model and it's MASSIVE.

coupe42

coupe42 wrote:I own an Alienware M17 (Dell PC) and had nothing but problems with it from day 1. Just about every issue you can imagine from hardware to software issues. When, with heavy emphasize on when, it runs it does OK for a $2,200 20lb brick... When it doesn't, don't expect anything remotely close to quality customer service from Dell. They're neither timely nor insightful on trouble shooting issues, but they are very knowledgeable and dependable when it comes to reminding you about your warranty limitations and related out of pocket costs for customers. Based on that experience I bought my next gaming laptop from NW and had no issues with the performance of the rig or service. Dell = bad.

showcaller

Ever since Woot mysteriously pulled those Bar b Cues off the website half way through their run I am now getting panic attacks - wondering if at any given moment they are going to pull an item I was about to hit the button for.

LordEddy

I'll pile on as someone else that has this laptop (though I have significantly more memory at 32GB). Add a SSD or two and you'll be blazing on it. I'm running Windows 8 and running it off a SSD and it boots from shutdown to login within, no joke, 5 seconds. It's a thing of beauty.

IslandHydro

robor007 wrote:We have owned a G75 for a little over a year. It was fast but I wasn't blown away by the speed until I installed an SSD. After that, wow. Definitely add one if you're going to spend $1K on this power.

How do you transfer the operating system to an SSD? Does this thing come with install discs?

pabower

This isn't an amazing sale based on computer specs. I picked up a similar Lenovo last October for a hundred more. The thing that makes it wootworthy is that it is a 17.3" screen. If you don't mind spending a little more for much better specs check out the sidebar on the SuggestALaptop subreddit.

gandalas

second ... I am guessing it is an OK/good gaming machine but not great

third .... 1000 dollars ... that's 1K ! Wait for school sales and get this type of system for much less. The graphics card is OK (better are out there) but not 1K great. The i7 is OK but is rather old version (2-3 yrs for the i7 ~ must be better ones out there).

Overall: pass

Yeah, let me add to the multitude of users that say you have no idea what you are talking about. ASUS G-series laptops are VERY capable gaming machines. Not quite Alienware/Clevo/Sager quality, but about as close as you will find for around $1K (You would easily spend over $2K for these specs on the above machines).

I have been wanting to get one of these G-series laptops for a while now...I wish this deal could have came out a couple of weeks from now.

gak0090

This is by all means a sweet laptop. This is nicely configured, except at this price point it should have a Blu-ray burner- especially considering the resolution of 1080P. Even though it has a standard HD, at least it is 7200 RPM which will make for a nice complement to an SSD that you can add in the other bay. The fact they omitted the SSD isn't so bad here, because they have a spare bay open- and I would rather have my choice of what SSD to add. As far as the memory goes...before everyone goes all crazy trying to up the memory to 32 gb- try running a RAM utilization program while you are using the laptop under max conditions. In 99.9% of the cases you will be nowhere near using all that 8 GB of RAM. The exception would be if you were running a bunch of virtual OS's- then I could understand increasing the RAM- but I doubt you would ever need more than 16GB even in that case. So the RAM at 8 GB is decent to start, and with access to at least 2 modules- I don't think there is anything to worry about. http://www.zdnet.com/how-much-ram-do-i-need-early-2013-edition-7000011139/

lhilt

I bought this laptop from Amazon at full price, and even though I am jealous at the sales price, I've gotten my extra $600 out of it over time :-)

The great thing is this - Not only is it a capable gaming rig, but it also is a capable desktop replacement for me as I travel often for work and need a machine capable of handling my IT work, while being portable. Ability to game with it after hours is just the icing on the cake.

Heat dissipation is much better than most machines with Asus's dual fan, rear exhaust design. Keeps your lap nice and cool and the machine temperature properly moderated as well.

I would agree with those who say that the HDD could use the upgrade to SSD, however I've not done that yet and I still enjoy playing Far Cry 3 and Skyrim without delays, and Compiling large amounts of .Net code for work is just as fast as I need it to be.

Some of the Cons:
1) The Weight. This thing weighs a HUGE amount. If you're like me and travel with it a lot, you'll want a dual-strap backpack to help off-shed the load. I question the Specs listing the weight at 9.9 lbs -- I find it to weigh more in the neighborhood of 12-15 lbs when I fly.

2) The design that I like the most, heat dissipation, causes some headache with most bags for 17.3 laptops. Because Asus decided on rear instead of bottom exhaust, it extends the form factor of the machine by about 1.5 - 2 inches. I purchased a rugged backpack for mine, and had to return it for the 18" model because of this extension

Ultimately, I am very happy with the purchase, and feel that it will long outlast my expectations. I typically buy any machine for my business or personal use spec'd out to attempt to last me on a 4-6 year cycle without coming too dated. This machine, I feel, for what I do (programming and casual gaming) will far outlast those expectations.

draigun

Not sure how the touchpad is on this thing, but I have another in the RoG line, and the touchpad is virtually useless. It has remained off ever since I got the thing.

Other than that, it's a little bulky, so I don't really expect to carry this thing around anywhere.

That being said, this is literally the best notebook I have ever bought in my entire life. It runs anything I want to play, on the highest settings. (Though mine has 3GB dedicated RAM on the graphics card and 12GB RAM overall.) I have officially sworn allegiance to ASUS.

I would recommend switching out to a SSD for your primary drive (and a larger regular HDD for your secondary). My system boots up in probably 5-10 seconds now. It's ridiculously nice.

muol

I've owned this model for almost a year. Bought it initially just for bridging the wait until release of a much more powerful gaming laptop in the 3k range from a different manufacturer. But then I realized that the midrange video card and entry level i7 quad core CPU of this Asus is powerful enough to smoothly run any game I threw at it. So I just kept the machine and saved a lot of money. Meanwhile I've upgraded it with 32GB RAM and a Blue-ray drive, and it runs perfectly stable under Windows 8 Pro and Ubuntu 12.04.

GunnerDonAL

IslandHydro wrote:How do you transfer the operating system to an SSD? Does this thing come with install discs?

No, but you CAN make your own (it comes with a program to do that), THEN install your new drive, then run the Recovery from your disks.

I have a year and a half old version of this and absolutely LOVE it. I use more than my desktop. I installed a Seagate HYBRID drive. $110 for a 640GB solid state/traditional hard drive. Boot time from BIOS to USABLE Win7 desktop is 15-20 seconds.
Slaved the 1TB drive, replaced the DVD with a Blu-ray (it's standard laptop SATA so any drive should work), installed another 8GB of DDR3 and I'm totally blown away with it. There ARE a few games that won't run with the Mobile version of nVidia's chips, but they're mostly older games written for specific cards.
And, yes, the video card IS upgradable, but a new one's over $400.

greentea5425

I had this laptop for a bout a year. It is a very capable piece of hardware and can handle almost anything you throw at it. I did however go through 2 of them. First one after a day of use would not turn on, but it was promptly replaced. The second one I had the HDD controller go out. After sending it back to the repair center 3 times without them being able to fix it they just credited me with the original purchase price. With that I got the newer model with the GTX 765m for the same price ($1300) so it all worked out in the end.

jaxfrank

vcholman wrote:ASUS is second only to Alienware when it comes to gaming laptops. I am a programmer/computer security specialist, and I have a four year old ASUS laptop called the Stealth, which is the grandparent to this unit. Love the performance.

For the price this computer beats everything Alienware has or ever will have(this is my opinion of course based on a ton of research on almost your exact statement).

TheRaven

craigleslie wrote:fyi, ssd space and regular space are not the same. so a ssd of 500, will stor far more then a regular 500, or even 750. thats what youre missing.

No, what I was missing is this laptop has a second hard drive bay. That will allow you to put in a SSD very easily and then recover the factory install from the recovery partition on the original drive to the SSD and you make the SSD the boot drive.

So, you can get a smaller SSD as your boot/os drive and use the original hard drive for all your games/data.

Bandrik

I fully agree with the others: great laptop, if you get lucky. But if you have ANY issues, you might as well be on your own. Get a SquareTrade warranty. ASUS's customer service is infamous for being absolutely despicable. I know first-hand.

I picked up the older version of this laptop a few years ago, the G73JH. I had a wealth of issues, many of them "known issues". Months go by with ASUS forum threads filled with complaints and update requests, of which most were told "we're working on it..." with little results. The most helpful of ASUS employees were silenced by their supervisors.

My issues included an unreliable touchpad, a keyboard that frequently did not register keystrokes (so yor sentenes would loo lik this quitoftn), overheating, and frequent blue screens of death. I sent it in, it came back weeks later, with NOTHING fixed.

Edit: in all fairness, remember that I was referencing an older model with the complaints. ASUS has probably fixed the issues listed above by now with the laptop itself. It's probably a great laptop. But their poor customer service and support is still worth noting.

archerman2000

If you are looking for a laptop (desktop replacement) and this is in your price range (and Win8 doesn't scare you off) get this!!

This is better than any of the laptops I've seen posted here in the past. I'm on a G73JW right now. I do a decent amount of gaming and it keeps up great. Will run most on Ultimate graphics without issue.

This is a serious laptop though, and if you are looking for a desktop replacement this is it. If you travel and want something lite, run away.

I have had mine for couple of years, I'll travel with it, just a beast in the airport, not too bad if you travel by car as I did for 2.5 years. Anyway great laptop, I would get it to upgrade my hardware, but Win8 is a deal breaker.

gusvonpooch

second ... I am guessing it is an OK/good gaming machine but not great

third .... 1000 dollars ... that's 1K ! Wait for school sales and get this type of system for much less. The graphics card is OK (better are out there) but not 1K great. The i7 is OK but is rather old version (2-3 yrs for the i7 ~ must be better ones out there).

Overall: pass

Reading other Wooter's comments it seems that you're way off base with your post.

chalion

Well, I pulled the trigger on this. I've purchased Toshiba satellite laptops from woot and have been very pleased with them, plus a few HP desktops and the people I gifted those to have been quite happy with them. I've had a good track record with ASUS monitors and think this laptop will fit my needs perfectly. I've had some Raisinets (L.A.M.E.) duck purchases from woot, but they took care of those problems to my satisfaction.

thecorrectline

second ... I am guessing it is an OK/good gaming machine but not great

third .... 1000 dollars ... that's 1K ! Wait for school sales and get this type of system for much less. The graphics card is OK (better are out there) but not 1K great. The i7 is OK but is rather old version (2-3 yrs for the i7 ~ must be better ones out there).

Overall: pass

So many "What the hell is this guy talking about?" in this post.

In order I guess, first: Sony is not top of the line. For gaming laptops Asus is as good as you're going to get unless you shop Sager. Note that most other "custom" laptop makers are Sager rebrands.

Second: For a laptop this is a great gaming solution.

Third: $999 for a gaming laptop is awesome.

Fourth: That's a 3rd gen i7. Fourth gen just came out, and laptops featuring them are $1800+

Please comment on laptops *after* you have stopped believing Sony is "top of the line". Thanks!

jDa5id

I had a G75VW-RS72 custom built by Pro-Star. It's got a large SSD and 7200RPM HDD along with some other upgrades. I also paid $130 extra for Win 7 pro (which still irks me). With all that it was about double this but I got it exactly how I wanted. I couldn't be happier with it. I've had alienware (pre-Dell) and have nothing bad to say (actually pretty good) but these same specs would have been a few hundred more for me. I have had zero problems in 6 months.

I think this is a very good deal and doubt anyone would regret it. A couple things, as mentioned it is huge and heavy. Most 17" laptop bags are not going to work. I got an Everki Beacon bag (which I adore)that works very good. It fits up to 18" and it's still snug. The power supply is monstrous. The keyboard ia wonderful as is the screen. It's blistering fast.

DutrowLLC

I Have a version of this laptop, the G74S. I love it. Like other people here, I added an SSD hard drive. This computer is probably more for nerds. It is very powerful, the screen is very large...

...but it is also very BIG and very HEAVY. It has air intakes on the back the size of a normal desktop. It looks like a buick. Whenever people who are not familiar with it pick it up, they usually are like "Holy S**T this F****R is heavy!" If you buy this in a store, none of this will be a surprise to you, but I could see some people online getting it and not realizing how ginormous it is. With the giant brick of a power supply that comes with it, your laptop bag (which will also be bigger than normal) will easily weigh 15 lbs. Having this laptop on airplanes SUCKS.

That being said, I knew all this going into it and I would definitely buy it again. The screen is huge which increases productivity and reduces strain on my eyes. With the i7 and SSD, it flies, also increasing my productivity. The components, like the keyboard, on it are sturdy. It gets the job done and for that, I'll haul its big a** through the airport when I have to.

DutrowLLC

IslandHydro wrote:How do you transfer the operating system to an SSD? Does this thing come with install discs?

It was easy for me, I imaged the hard drive that came with it and put that image on the SSD. The laptop booted from the SSD just like it would have from the original hard drive. Then I wiped the original hard drive and put it in the secondary hard drive bay (The G74S has one, I assume this one does too?).

I feel like in order to do this, I had the two drives hooked up to a second computer and the Crucial SSD that I bought came with the cable or something. Not all SSDs come with the cable, but some do. Its not an expensive cable, like $10.

scotrinaf

gak0090 wrote:This is by all means a sweet laptop. This is nicely configured, except at this price point it should have a Blu-ray burner- especially considering the resolution of 1080P. Even though it has a standard HD, at least it is 7200 RPM which will make for a nice complement to an SSD that you can add in the other bay. The fact they omitted the SSD isn't so bad here, because they have a spare bay open- and I would rather have my choice of what SSD to add. As far as the memory goes...before everyone goes all crazy trying to up the memory to 32 gb- try running a RAM utilization program while you are using the laptop under max conditions. In 99.9% of the cases you will be nowhere near using all that 8 GB of RAM. The exception would be if you were running a bunch of virtual OS's- then I could understand increasing the RAM- but I doubt you would ever need more than 16GB even in that case. So the RAM at 8 GB is decent to start, and with access to at least 2 modules- I don't think there is anything to worry about. http://www.zdnet.com/how-much-ram-do-i-need-early-2013-edition-7000011139/

I have an earlier model of this laptop and I have upgraded it to 16gb of RAM as well as adding a 16gb SD Extreme chip for readyboost... Of course, I run Photoshop and other processor/graphic intensive programs, but if the laptop can support it, I say go for it!

pmperry

second ... I am guessing it is an OK/good gaming machine but not great

third .... 1000 dollars ... that's 1K ! Wait for school sales and get this type of system for much less. The graphics card is OK (better are out there) but not 1K great. The i7 is OK but is rather old version (2-3 yrs for the i7 ~ must be better ones out there).

Overall: pass

You have no clue what you're talking about! I'm on this machine and the reason I am is because 1. It is an ASUS and 2. None of the others had anything close for the price!

This is a $1500 Laptop for $1k and it smokes 95% of the other machines out there including all MacBook Pro models including the Retina group.

pmperry

DutrowLLC wrote:It was easy for me, I imaged the hard drive that came with it and put that image on the SSD. The laptop booted from the SSD just like it would have from the original hard drive. Then I wiped the original hard drive and put it in the secondary hard drive bay (The G74S has one, I assume this one does too?).

I feel like in order to do this, I had the two drives hooked up to a second computer and the Crucial SSD that I bought came with the cable or something. Not all SSDs come with the cable, but some do. Its not an expensive cable, like $10.

You buy a 16 Gig USB Stick and use the Windows Tool to transfer the restore partition to the Stick. There are plenty of instructions online about it.

gak0090

scotrinaf wrote:I have an earlier model of this laptop and I have upgraded it to 16gb of RAM as well as adding a 16gb SD Extreme chip for readyboost... Of course, I run Photoshop and other processor/graphic intensive programs, but if the laptop can support it, I say go for it!

So basically you are saying that even if a user is not not using real photoshop or doing virtual Os's or something, than they should just increase the amount of RAM so it can remained unused? You should save you money and invest it in an SSD if you want to see a real performance benefit. Ready boost when you have 16gb of RAM is a joke.

pmperry

pmperry

TheRaven wrote:It's not that easy to replace the 750GB 7200RPM hard drive with a SSD.

First off, there are no 750GB SSD drives. The Crucial M500 960GB drive is $599 on Amazon. The cheapest 500GB SSD I've seen on Amazon is the Samsung 840 for $320.00 and if you go with that you've just lost 250GB of storage space.

Second, Asus provides a special recovery partition on their machines HD's. They do this so if you totally screw it up (as many people do) you can easily recover it back to a factory state. If you just slap a new SSD in there you don't have this recovery partition or the OS and other stuff (drivers) that come with the machine.

To retain that you will need to do a complete image backup of the original hard drive and then restore that to your new SSD before you "slide it in".

This costs a fair amount of money and will take a good amount of time to do even if you already have hard drive imaging software and you know what you're doing.

Just making it clear that it's not as easy to do as it's being described above unless I'm missing something. :-)

The machine does look good however if you really need a laptop for gaming.

ElGuappo

The GTX 660M will do everything a GTX550Ti will do in a comparable desktop, and more. Considering the 550 is still considered a very good bang-for-buck GPU, that is pretty impressive. But this processor is far better than most machines that date back to the heyday of the 550Ti, so its double chocolaty good! Borderlands 2, Crysis 3, Assassin's Creed 3, Bioshock Infinite, all should be playable on ultra or just below. I don't think there is a current Laptop GPU out there offering any substantial improvement over the 660M that justifies the added cost. If this won't let you get your game on then you need to consider a far higher price range.

LordBling

theindiearmy wrote:I was thinking the same thing. I just picked up the Lenovo Y510p for about $100 more. It's got a Haswell i7 and SLI GT750s in it. Thing is an absolute screamer.

I got a Y500 about a month ago with the same configuration, and am loving it. It smokes pretty much everything I throw at it, and at half the price of the MSI laptop I almost bought instead. The only negative is Windows 8, but I'm using the Classic Shell mod and now it boots right to the desktop instead of that stupid Charms menu.

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